Formation Flying and Obstacle Avoidance Control of UAV Cluster Based on Backbone Network

Abstract

This paper studies the formation flight and obstacle avoidance control of UAV clusters based on the backbone network. Firstly, the distributed flocking control algorithm is applied to UAV cluster based on backbone network. This method can make UAV cluster network have good scalability and ensure the connectivity when the network topology is switched. It can also make all the UAVs in the swarm asymptotically achieve the velocity consensus and avoid collision between the UAVs. Then, for the splitting problem of UAV cluster network during the process of obstacle avoidance, this paper proposes a leader-follower strategy, which makes the backbone UAVs in the subnet only acquire virtual leader’s information and makes the split subnets re-networked, ultimately achieving a stable desired cluster behavior. Finally, experimental simulations show the effectiveness of the above two methods.